Tuesday, 13 January 2015

In this new documentary for BBC1 (and BBC
Worldwide), I team up with ‘Pointless’ and ‘Have I Got News For You’ host
Xander Armstrong to investigate the invisible world of underground Rome.

Our
mission was to find, access and investigate the spaces that were underground
even in ancient Rome – through man hole covers in roads, hidden doorways,
secret spiraling staircases – abseiling
down 20 metre tunnels, climbing down rickety old step ladders and scrambling on
our hands and knees. With us as our guides were members of Rome’s Underground
Archaeology Unit, whose job it is to find and investigate these hidden gems of
ancient Rome.

What kind of spaces did we find?
Underground ancient Roman quarries that, when plotted on a map make Rome look
like a Swiss Cheese. Underground aqueducts that carried up to a billion litres
of water a day into Rome. The Cloaca Maxima ‘ the Great Drain’ of Rome that is
still an operating sewer today, having been in use for roughly 2500 years. The
myriad of catacombs for Rome’s dead, and the secret spaces of its underground
religious cults, not to mention the underground labyrinth of tunnels and spaces
that powered some of ancient Rome’s most important and famous monuments like
the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracella.

Accompanying us was a team of 3D laser
scanners (ScanLAB Projects), whose
job it was to map these incredible and often confusing underground spaces in
more detail than ever before using the latest cutting edge technology. The
results of their work are absolutely stunning, allowing us to understand the
relationship between spaces above and below ground, as well as to open us these
very difficult to access places to fine-grain archaeological investigation by
scholars based all over the world.

This was a difficult programme to make,
working in difficult and often dangerous spaces: I have never had to don so
many layers of protective clothing, hard hats, and waterproofs for a programme
before! We journey from the freezing crystal clear waters of Rome’s underground
aqueducts to the foul smelling and excrement festooned environment of its
sewers, via the claustrophobic worm-like tunnels of its underground tufo
quarries to the rabbit-warren of catacomb tunnels in which you can get lost in
an instant.

What did we learn? For me, this programme
offered more than an opportunity to see some of ancient Rome’s hidden secrets.
It was a chance to get to grips with some of the unsung spaces, without which
Rome could not have survived as a city of a million people, and without which
it may never have grown to become such an extraordinary city at the centre of
such a formidable empire.

Join us – Xander on his vespa and me in my
Lancia Flavia while we are above ground at least – for a journey of discovery
into Rome’s arteries, veins, lungs and bowels – and in doing so understand why
Rome was at the centre of a perfect storm: blessed with extraordinary natural
and geological resources, armed with a spirit of invention and determination to
push the boundaries of possibility, and ready to exploit its own human
resources to the max to create a city which we still wonder at today, and which
occupies an incredible place in our story board of human history.

About Me

Michael is an Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History at the
University of Warwick, author of several books on ancient Greek and Roman
society, and has written and presented a range of documentaries for National
Geographic, History Channel and the BBC.